The disclosures herein relate generally to communication systems and more particularly to communication systems which transmit text and other messages to user communication devices.
Intelligent mobile devices including personal digital assistances (PDA's), smart phones and small hand-held computers are becoming more common. To enable mail and other messages to be electronically delivered to mobile devices, the mobile device is typically connected to a mail server either through a wireless link or by a fixed wired connection when the device is cradled or docked. It is useful to occasionally update the mobile device with information from the mail server. For example, as time goes by the mail server will receive mail which is addressed to a particular mobile device. The activity of updating the mobile device's stored data with messages and data intended for a particular mobile device may be referred to as synchronizing or synching the mobile device.
In one representative communication system, the system includes hundreds of mobile devices each with its own mailbox on the mail server. Every 30 seconds the system opens all of the mailboxes and sends newly arrived messages to the mobile devices. Unfortunately, this type of system does not lend itself to scaling. When you scale up to thousands of mobile devices and mailboxes, the system slows down as it tries to open all of the mailboxes to send newly arrived messages to the mobile devices. Wireless transmission speeds are currently substantially less than the speed obtainable via fixed wire line connections. Thus when a wireless message communication system is scaled up to accommodate a large number of users, the effective communication speeds as perceived by users can substantially suffer.
What is needed is a way to scale up a message communication system with less degradation in the effective speed with which messages are communicated to communication device users.